Survival of the Fittest is a
phrase often attributed in error to Charles Darwin. But it was Herbert Spencer who actually
connected these words in 1864 to describe the inevitable fate of the poor in an
industrialized world. Others called his
theories Social Darwinism. That's right, it is a real thing, or at least
it once was in times gone by. Fox Republicans are today
trying to bring this long-discredited philosophy back from the dead.

Economists
of the central tradition like Smith and Malthus had dealt primarily with
aggregate wealth rather than the contrast between luxury and poverty in society. They acknowledged that poverty would always be
the norm, and would be limited only by access to resources needed to eat and
reproduce. But nobody unashamedly celebrated widespread poverty until
Spencer.

An
Englishman by birth, an economist by trade, and a racist by proclivity, Spencer
took the findings of Charles Darwin and applied them to the world of human
enterprise, yielding some cruel and bizarre arguments. To wit: Assisting the poor interferes with the laws
of nature; as does impeding the accumulation of affluence by the wealthy. The poor require depredation to evolve; to
keep it from them is morally wrong. The
fittest are genetically predisposed to excellence; therefore so are their
spawn. Private charity is of value only
in that it allows the giver to express his generosity; no such justification
exists for public charity. Among the inferior poor, widespread death from starvation or exposure was the expected, even desired, consequence.

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Such were
the principles of Social Darwinism, and they infused the age of opulence in the
late nineteenth century. In Connecticut,
William Graham Sumner served as Spencer's faithful disciple, and provided ample
moral justification for the extreme wealth concentration that flourished as
never before on the American continent. Think
Gatsby. But these extremes were not
permanent.

The Democratic Alternative

In
opposition to the concentrated power of monarchy and church, our founding
fathers created a social, political, and economic system based upon the notion
of equality and democracy. Such a democracy
gives a voice to poor people, thus balancing the power of wealth with sheer
numbers. In a democracy Social Darwinism
cannot long prevail, and indeed the early twentieth century witnessed increased
constraints upon wealth and a renewed nurturing of the underclass. By the middle of that century increasing
union membership, growing mass consumption, economic mobility, and more
rational public policies had mitigated the extreme concentration of wealth
found sixty years before. Social
Darwinism was dead, at least for a while.

Fox Republican Social Darwinists

What has this
to do with Fox Republicans, and who are these people? Many Republicans are quite decent people who
believe that their party has gone astray.
Many Conservatives honestly seek to return to the true virtues of a
bygone era. Even in the Tea Party are
those who genuinely want to limit the scope and waste of the federal
government. Out of respect, I refrain
from accusing any of these groups of harboring an affinity for Social
Darwinism. By contrast, however, there
are those who soak up the propaganda of Fox News, and spread it around their
sphere of influence. These are the Fox Republicans, and they are promoting
a resurgence of the beliefs of Herbert Spencer.

Examine
Spencer's public-policy positions to discover some alarming parallels with
today's Fox Republicans. Spencer opposed
any public aid to the needy. He opposed
public funding of the post office. He
opposed public education. He opposed
unions. He opposed a central government currency. He even opposed systems of public sanitation. Pretty cruel and inhumane, to be sure.

But even in the 21st century, Fox Republicans are unashamedly promoting many of the
positions of Herbert Spencer. Fox
Republicans of the 113th congress rolled back badly needed public assistance in
the form of food stamps and stopped extended unemployment benefits, while thwarting
efforts to raise the minimum wage. In
2006, Fox Republicans fed the US Postal Service a poison pill in the form of the
Postal Accountability and Enhancement Act that requires full funding of retirement
benefits, even while denying the Service the autonomy of pricing its own products. Fox Republicans have waged a well-organized
war on public education in the form of attacks upon teacher unions, funding
cutbacks, curriculum directives, and incentives for private schools. Fox Republicans have mounted assaults against
unions in the form of NLRB funding cutbacks, legal challenges originating at
ALEC, and direct attacks by state governments against their public unions. Fox Republicans have been led to support the
abolition of the Federal Reserve, for all the wrong reasons. And although we have yet to see Fox
Republicans oppose public sanitation, a longstanding trend of privatizing
utilities and waste management is alive and well.

Resisting the Resurrection of Social Darwinism

Smith and
Malthus assumed the presence of the invisible hand of competition to be always
at work in the economy. As oligopolies
developed into monopolies that concentrated wealth and destroyed competition,
Spencer and Sumner celebrated the widespread poverty that followed. After all, they argued that poverty is inevitable, and its
presence lends proof of their precious theory. Never mind the hypocrisy inherent in public
policies that favor the formation and accumulation of capital.

Spencer
was wrong. Poverty is not a feature of
national economies, but rather a bug. America has a long tradition of economic policies that serve
the nation poorly by favoring capital over labor. Only when we come to realize that poverty is
not inevitable can we enact policies that will eradicate it.

Years ago I made a decision to commit to a life of business management. Kids do the dumbest things! After thirty five years as a small business consultant, CFO, and university educator specializing in quantitative business and economic (more...)